The Love of My Life(64)

I was twenty years old, my baby had been stolen and I had no one on my side.

The midwife left and I gave in and fed the baby because how could I not? He felt wrong and my breasts wept to feed another baby when my own was missing.

The midwife had somehow concealed a surveillance camera in the carriage clock on Granny’s mantelpiece. There was another above the door, and I suspected a whole suite of them in the kitchen. Hundreds of secret lenses swivelled back and forth as I paced the house.

The sky darkened further as the sun began to sink on the day, on me. Granny’s house was full of flowers and sweet cotton bibs and knitted socks. There was a breast pump, but I couldn’t remember going out that afternoon to buy one and Granny said it had been there all along.

A GP came round in the early evening. She told me she was calling the community mental health team, so I called 999 and told them a group of people in Hampstead had stolen my baby and were now trying to pretend I was having a psychiatric crisis. I don’t remember what they said to me.

The sky was maroon-streaked and the camera in the Edwardian clock was watching me. Granny was feeding Charlie with a bottle, which he didn’t seem to mind. I implored her to stop this conspiracy but she just told me she loved me, and then we both cried.

The people who came round that night didn’t have my daughter. It was two women, a social worker and a psychiatrist, they said, and they were there to carry out a Mental Health Act assessment. One of them smelled as if she’d just finished a cigarette. I said I had to go to the toilet but really my plan was to climb up to the roof terrace and try to find a way down via our neighbour’s house, which was covered in scaffolding.

Or maybe not the scaffolding? If I couldn’t get my daughter back, did I want to live? I could just step off the roof into the black arms of the evening. It would be quick. This lovely boy, Charlie, would be back to his mother in no time, and – and . . .

Someone grabbed my foot as it disappeared up the ladder to the roof hatch. There was a baby crying downstairs.

A depthless dark broke over me as I sat in a room that looked like Granny’s kitchen and answered questions. I had lost my baby. They were all in on it.

People talked to other people, somebody else came to speak to me, something about the Mental Health Act.

Eventually I said I’d go to this hospital for mad mothers they kept going on about, but only if they let me bring my real baby.

Later, or perhaps the next day, they sent the crazy ambulance.

I shouted at Granny, I will never forgive you, and she was crying, which was understandable given what she’d done, although she was saying, ‘I can’t lose another one, please, I can’t lose another one,’ which didn’t make any sense because it was my baby who had been stolen, not hers.





Chapter Forty


North London & UCLH NHS Foundation Mental Health Trust Mother and Baby Unit, Camden

I lay on the bed and monitored the faces at my door; bodies in uniform watching. In a chair right next to the bed, Charlie was being bottle-fed by a woman with a lanyard round her neck. His actual mother, perhaps? This place was horrifying. Doors were locked, everywhere, but the door to my own room remained resolutely open and there was no lock at all on my bathroom door. There were spy cameras and babies crying.

Another woman, who’d greeted me at the front door, came in at that moment. She told me for the second time her name was Shazia – as if I cared! – and talked to me about tranquilisers. She told me I needed a night’s ‘protected sleep’.

‘It’s this child who needs protecting,’ I said. ‘He’s been stolen from his mother; he’s less than a week old. Someone else has my baby. Do you know if the police are involved yet? No? Well, either way I’m not willing to zonk out on pills. I don’t think you understand how awful the last few days have been . . .’

‘I do understand,’ she said, and in spite of myself I liked her voice. ‘I do understand, Emily, because it’s my job to look after women in your situation. I know you’re afraid, and I know you’re angry, and above all I know this is not where you want to be.’

When I refused the drugs she said she’d come back in half an hour.

I cuddled Charlie for a while, because he was lovely, and I was afraid of this place, but I cried for her – my girl, whose name – whose name was . . .

Had they drugged me already?

I asked the woman in the chair where my grandmother was, and she seemed surprised, because apparently I’d said I didn’t want Granny anywhere me. In the end she agreed Granny could come tomorrow morning. ‘We need to assess you properly first,’ she said. She, too, had a nice voice. I suppose they were accustomed to making women feel safe before swapping their babies around and pretending we’d all gone mad.

As the day came to an end I felt so afraid I realised I had to be either dead or unconscious if I were to survive another minute. I gave in to Shazia’s pills. ‘Just rest,’ she said. She had hair like black satin. ‘Charlie’s fine. He’s going to be in the nursery tonight. He’s taken beautifully to the bottle.’

I floated on a slack tide.

They kept me in that barely-conscious space for days, but insisted it had been less than twelve hours, that it was now Saturday lunchtime. I had been admitted the night before.

Shazia handed me Charlie and it came to me that I loved him with a force almost indistinguishable from pain, but by mid-afternoon the black sky had rolled back in and I cried for my daughter.